When I grow up, I want to be a search engine!

To the outside world, the Majestic12 website doesn’t look like much – it hardly even resembles a search engine. But behind that plain-looking facade, Majestic12 is a living, breathing organism with thousands of participating computers who crawl the web for content and links . Majestic12 users donate their bandwidth to the project, and I’m trying to do my part. The actual search engine of the project is still after almost four years of crawling pretty much useless, and any of the larger search engines do a far better job, but the concept is intriguing and the thought is good. Another interesting idea is that you can create your own search algorithm, providing you are handy enough! All that is needed is to register on the search engine subsite and start tinkering with the priorities that you feel are important in search results.

I’ve got the power! Now if I just edit a random memory location anndd…

Of course, with putting the trust in the end users comes great responsibility – a user might have had his DNS records hijacked, rerouting sites incorrectly and possibly lowering the ranking of benevolent sites while improving that of malicious ones – or he might be a ill-natured hacker himself, possibly trying to employ SEO for his own or a contractors site, requiring double- and triple-checking by independent other users of the project, as suggested in this forum post, which increases the load on web servers as each page has to be checked multiple times to ensure correctness. This hasn’t seemed to be a problem thus far, but as the search engine grows I hope that the programmers behind this extremely ambitious project are prepared for counter-measures. All I can do for now is to urge you to start your own node and help with this project. The crawling software runs under Windows, OSX and Linux.

Majestic12 is a great alternative to other causes like SETI@Home and it might very well be the future of search engines.

Majestic 12? That sounds familiar!You weren’t the only one to think that! Majestic 12 is one of the most popular conspiracy theories of all times and is thought to be a secret committee consisting of scientists and government officials gathered by president Truman after the supposed UFO Crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. There is a huge amount of information on the topic, and I haven’t even had time to skim the surface, but it seems like a fascinating read.

In other news…

The b(a/ea)stard in action

Ever since Mattias showed me Bastard Tetris, he has (possibly) inadvertently killed a small part of my soul. This seemingly innocent Tetris clone uses a custom-built algorithm that instead of randomizing the tetrominos you get, tries to give you the worst piece computationally possible. It even mocks you by showing which piece it will absolutely not give you under any circumstance. Oh the pain. My current record after a few infuriating games is 250 points, which translates to a measly five cleared lines. This game should be available to all *NIX and Linux distributions, and is called bastet in packet managers around the planet. For anyone else who wishes to play this I found a clone made in flash, although the algorithm seemed nicer as I managed to clear six lines on my first attempt.